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ters, and some loud little creatures lived inside the walls, busily digging and scratching, nibbling, chewing, sawing incessantly all winter long. Mice and squirrels sometimes skittered across the hardwood floors, and once a bat got in. I did not mind these occasional visits. It seemed natural to me that they found entrance into this dry, warm place, using it--as I did--for shelter and comfort, the windows and walls semi-permeable barriers between outside and in.
The place was bountifully populated with all manner of birds: crows, flashing red cardinals, great blue herons stilt-walking and sniping in the creek. Each spring migrating waterfowl convened at the pond. The Canada geese were the most fun to watch, perhaps because they came and squawked and fought and stayed awhile, mating, nesting, starting families.
Until I lived here I had not seen Canada geese close up. I knew them only from chilled autumn days when they'd be flying squadrons, aligned in a V, skimming the iron-gray sky. I could hear the faint voices, the trumpeting of encouragement, and watch till they disappeared, the cloud-painted sky but a windblown highway between far-off points on the globe. They were symbols of an extrahuman realm, whose occupations had to do with mysterious celestial chronometry and unimaginable spaces. I had admired them for their familial commitments and loyalty to airborne cohorts.
The pattern repeated each spring. One day they would not be here; the next morning their racket would awaken me, their honking and clatter announcing their robust arrival. Beautiful airborne, the geese are awkward on land. They waddled about, littering the place with pasty green droppings, arguing and flapping nastily. As swimmers, they seemed to glide as effortlessly as clipper ships, but their takeoffs and landings were clumsy, especially at this pond banded by thick, high trees that required steep ascents and descents in defyingly short spaces.
They spent a good deal of time fighting--barking at each other, nipping at rumps and necks and wings. Most of the combat had to do with courtship, I suppose, as the geese soon paired up and became fixed in place beside their nests, built with feathers, goose down, and grass near logs, trees, or bushes. It was not unusual to have five or six nests in the vicinity of the pond, each with a female sitting and the male standing vigil a few feet away. Only twice did I see a female leave her nest in the days and weeks of incubation. They would sit through cold rains and hail, thunder and lightning, occasionally nudging at the eggs beneath their ample bosom.
One Sunday morning I looked across the pond and noticed a mother had walked off her throne. She stood by the pond, and I spied what appeared to be a flurry of yellow-green leaves blowing about her feet. Soon I realized those were not leaves but newborns, wobbly and fuzzy and tumbling down the embankment to the water. They soon made their first crossing (little yellow tugboats in single-file procession), then staggered onto shore, bumping into each other, tagging along behind their mother, falling over tree roots, exploring the world their first day alive.
I would watch these families through spring and into summer as the furry goslings lost their fuzz (swapping yellow for a dishwater gray), growing as spindly and gawky as teenagers, developing personalities, then adding weight to their avian frames. In time--without my seeing how it was learned--the whole herd would up and fly away, leaving the pond pretty much as they had found it, and me missing the company and the show.
My second spring at the cabin I put out seed and bought a bird book and tried to document my sightings. But while I could pick out the commoner breeds, I could not discern the more exotic ones. I had trouble with all the commotion, the fleet arrivals and departures, the airy aviators gusting away on a puff of wind, leaving me to my guidebook, trying to recall the bands and crowns and markings. Male or female? Chickadee or finch? So I stopped.
I was happier when I quit consulting the book, quit trying to classify, categorize, and list, when I abandoned the taxonomy and the keeping score. I really learned to watch then, and to see. And my delight, my wonder was no less because I didn't know their given names. In fact, in those years at the cabin I learned a lot about ways of seeing. And being.
I was fortunate, I suppose, that in my middle years I had such a sabbatical, that I could step outside my life and see it from some distance--where I had been and where I might go. The retreat, the isolation, the view from that lone cabin was a blessing; most of us are not given such lucrative exile in the midst of our lives. Too often we are swept up in the currents of human trafficking, too consumed by the immediate demands of job and family to get free, to see over the walls of the maze.
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